tag:theconversation.com,2011:/au/topics/australian-financial-review-5269/articlesAustralian Financial Review – The Conversation2016-11-17T02:59:48Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/689162016-11-17T02:59:48Z2016-11-17T02:59:48ZYes, you're entitled to your opinion – but it helps if you're a man<p>Newspaper opinion pages are a largely male affair. Flick through the pages of the Australian Financial Review (AFR) or our other major newspapers over breakfast and you’ll find them even more homogeneous than the accompanying bowl of porridge. </p>
<p>In the six months to September this year, I collected data from the double page opinion sections of the AFR, The Age and The Australian. The period covered the Australian federal budget and election, the US election primaries, terror attacks in Paris, Nice and Orlando and the ongoing war in Syria. All generated substantial comment about economics, politics and foreign policy. More than 1,500 weekday opinion page articles were published in the three papers.</p>
<p>Nearly three-quarters of the articles across the three papers surveyed were written by men. Men wrote 61% of articles in The Age, 75% in The Australian and a whopping 88% in the AFR.</p>
<p>The AFR’s pages are less gender diverse than <a href="http://www.companydirectors.com.au/director-resource-centre/governance-and-director-issues/board-diversity/statistics">ASX 200 boards</a> (77% male), <a href="http://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/rp/rp1415/WomanAustParl">State and Federal parliament</a> (71% male), and <a href="https://docs.education.gov.au/node/38391">the upper echelons of academia</a> (68% male). </p>
<p>Laura Tingle is the AFR’s only regular female opinion page columnist. Days can go by without a woman featuring in any of the “guest” spots. Indeed, for five of the weeks I analysed, Tingle’s regular Friday column was the only piece by a woman that week.</p>
<p>The Australian achieves somewhat better gender balance because it has several female columnists, including Judith Sloan, Niki Savva and Jennifer Oriel. But it, too, rarely features women in its guest spots.</p>
<p>During the data collection period The Age changed its editorial team and the structure of its opinion pages from three longer articles to four or five shorter pieces. After the change, the proportion of articles from female contributors rose from 32% to 42%. The increase highlights role that editorial decision making can play in achieving better gender balance. As does <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/comment/our-secret-project-to-give-women-equal-media-airtime-20161024-gs93hk.html">Jon Faine’s recent success</a> in increasing the proportion of female guests on his show from 33% to 50%.</p>
<p>Gender diversity on opinion pages matters because these pages are a vital platform for academics, experts, lobby groups and journalists to influence public debate and decision makers. They bring a sizeable audience. Together these three newspapers have an estimated daily <a href="http://www.roymorgan.com/industries/media/readership/cross-platform-audiences-newspapers">hard copy readership</a> of almost 2.3 million and an <a href="http://www.roymorgan.com/industries/media/readership/cross-platform-audiences-newspapers">online audience</a> of 5.1 million. </p>
<p>Opinion pieces – generally between 500 and 1,000 words – give people more opportunity to develop their arguments than do many alternative forms of media such as television and radio interviews.</p>
<h2>Who’s really influencing policy?</h2>
<p>Poor representation on opinion pages means less scope for women to influence opinion and effect policy change. It may mean less prominence for issues such as childcare funding and the gender pay gap that are particularly important to women. It also normalises and reinforces the role of men as experts, particularly in economic topics in which male views are strongly over-represented.</p>
<p>Australia appears to be on par with other western nations when it comes to gender diversity in opinion, although the AFR stands out by global standards as particularly unbalanced.</p>
<p>A year-long <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/sep/07/gender-media-best-data-available">Guardian survey</a> of gender balance in the UK newspapers – the Guardian, The Telegraph, and Daily Mail – in 2011-12 found that 73% of opinion articles (where gender was identifiable) were written by males.</p>
<p>In the US, a 12-week survey by the <a href="http://www.theopedproject.org/">Op-ed Project</a> in 2011 found 80% of opinion articles in the traditional/legacy media – The New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, and the Wall Street Journal – were written by men.</p>
<p>New media outlets, The Huffington Post and Salon, were somewhat more balanced, but even in those publications men wrote 67% of articles. While women in the traditional media were found to write more articles on the “pink” topics of gender, family and style, they were woefully underrepresented on general interest topics including politics and economics. Notably women authors wrote just 20% of articles on economics in the new media and only 11% in traditional media.</p>
<p>The reasons men continue to dominate the opinion pages of our non-tabloid mastheads are complex. But the fact that these pages are often more male dominated than the institutions that generate most contributions (business, academia, politics) suggests that editorial decisions play a role.</p>
<p>But women are also less likely to submit pieces than men. Editors in the United States report that <a href="http://www.poynter.org/2011/why-women-dont-contribute-to-opinion-pages-as-often-as-men-what-we-can-do-about-it/118696/">men are many more times to submit letters to the editor and opinion pieces</a>.</p>
<p>Whatever the reason, the figures are disappointing. Reporting them might encourage some editors to look beyond the usual suspects when seeking contributions. </p>
<p>The <a href="http://esacentral.org.au/news/21570/women-in-economics-network">Women in Economics Network</a> is launching a register of female economists for media outlets looking for new voices. The <a href="http://www.wlia.org.au/">Women in Leadership Institute</a> has a similar register for prominent female leaders.</p>
<p>I encourage women in all disciplines to share their expertise by submitting pieces. In doing so, you could make people’s breakfasts around the country that much more interesting.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/68916/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Danielle Wood is the Chair of the Women in Economics Network.</span></em></p>Why are the opinion pages of Australia's media pages less diverse than even ASX 200 boards?Danielle Wood, Fellow, Australian Perspectives, Grattan InstituteLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/187842013-10-01T20:37:18Z2013-10-01T20:37:18ZFairfax staff cuts will worsen decline in corporate investigations<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/32249/original/5vk38vt8-1380607998.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;rect=0%2C0%2C4094%2C2187&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Fairfax Media has confirmed 25 staff from its business media unit will be made redundant as Fairfax moves toward further integrating its metropolitan mastheads.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Dean Lewins</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Yesterday’s announcement of another 45 jobs to go at Australia’s second largest newspaper proprietor Fairfax Media is yet another marker in the decline of Australia’s print media news sector.</p>
<p>In an email to staff, Fairfax’s Australian Publishing Media managing director Allen Williams told it plainly: “The current revenue environment remains challenging … we must also find cost reductions across our business.”</p>
<p>No one can argue that managing a newspaper in the digital era is easy. Technological, social, political and economic factors have seen newspaper revenues and circulations steadily fall from the heady days of great profits in the 1970s and early 1980s.</p>
<p>It’s also plain that Fairfax’s decision to cut costs by merging business reporting teams across its metropolitan mastheads and shed 25 business media staff is bad news for the Australian public. The move suggests fewer voices scrutinising corporate power when there is evidence that there are already not enough.</p>
<p>My research examining Australian newspapers over the seven decades from 1956 to 2011 found a conspicuous absence of corporate investigations from broadsheets in recent decades compared to times when profits were higher. As early as the 1990s the data showed the “profit controversy” was evident in Australian mainstream media business reporting.</p>
<p>Sydney academics Penny O'Donnell, David McKnight and Jonathan Este used this term to describe the contest between newspaper profitability and their future capability to maintain a public interest role. </p>
<p>My research, which focused on investigative reporting, found a troubling trend about business investigative reporting in Australia: while the number of investigative journalism stories increased over time, business investigative reports declined. </p>
<p>There were notable exceptions such as The Age’s Richard Baker and Nick McKenzie’s Walkley award-winning expose about corruption within Reserve Bank of Australia’s note-making subsidiaries, but generally the data showed that broadsheet newspapers had moved away from investigating abuses of corporate power. </p>
<p>Crime stories and local investigations are more common – local stories are cheaper (there are no great travel costs) and crime stories are voyeuristically popular.</p>
<p>In fact, the data showed that the Australian Financial Review was the exception to the rule. In the past decade it increased its corporate investigative journalism. While this is good news for public accountability, the reporting is in a specialist newspaper that largely speaks to a niche business-minded audience. </p>
<p>It is concerning that the nation’s major broadsheets, including The Age, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian, are not investigating the business community in the general public’s interests, as perhaps they should.</p>
<p>One conclusion for newspapers’ move away from corporate and financial investigations could be that as profits have declined newspapers were more cautious not to upset corporate advertisers. </p>
<p>Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz argued a similar point during the GFC about the US media. He said they had become captive to their sources succumbing to “strong incentives for the media not to serve as part of society’s systems of checks and balances”.</p>
<p>Whether or not this is the reason for the loss of Australian corporate investigative journalism, the latest Fairfax business redundancies leaves even fewer skilled journalists to scrutinise corporate power. </p>
<p>Business reporting will be further limited by the ABC’s decision to axe its half-hour Sunday business program Inside Business hosted by Alan Kohler.</p>
<p>Fairfax’s announcement also removes previous doubts about content sharing of business stories across Fairfax mastheads. Monday’s front pages of Fairfax’s Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian Financial Review running the same tale about ex-News Corp Australia CEO Kim Williams leaving the Sydney Opera House board by AFR journalist Joe Aston, provides a clear example of it.</p>
<p>To use a chef’s analogy, sharing of content across mastheads means different restaurants but the same kitchen. In other words, story diversity is likely to suffer when mastheads pool resources to cover stories. </p>
<p>While the cost cutting and sharing of content might bolster Fairfax’s share price, when it comes to investigating corporate power, we are all the losers.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/18784/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Andrea Carson previously worked as a journalist at The Age</span></em></p>Yesterday’s announcement of another 45 jobs to go at Australia’s second largest newspaper proprietor Fairfax Media is yet another marker in the decline of Australia’s print media news sector. In an email…Andrea Carson, Honorary Research Fellow Centre for Advancing Journalism , University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/139452013-06-20T20:36:22Z2013-06-20T20:36:22ZIntegrated reporting to walk more than the bottom line
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/25632/original/jskv8m8j-1371429258.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;rect=0%2C1%2C1000%2C663&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Boards will need to be ‘six-capital literate’ in order to assess performance, identify risks and develop strategy.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Paul Druckman, the CEO of the International Integrated Reporting Council <a href="http://www.theiirc.org">(IIRC)</a>, recently led the coalition’s global charge on corporate reporting changes to Australia, where he bolstered support and talked uptake turkey with business leaders and officials. </p>
<p>“We’re not about more reporting, we’re about better reporting,” Mr Druckman told <a href="http://www.thesustainabilityreport.com.au/iirc-ceo-favours-market-led-adoption-of-integrated-reporting/3829/"><em>The Sustainability Report</em>.</a></p>
<p>The council’s Integrated Reporting initiative has the potential to change the relationship between business, society and the environment by changing the way accountants and boards, in particular, think about business success and strategic-decision making. </p>
<p>Climate change and scarce natural resources, for example, all have an impact on the long-term success of a business and Integrated Reporting would bring this into focus.</p>
<p>Until now, corporate reporting has primarily focused on bottom-line dollars. Integrated Reporting requires organisations to also report on their governance and strategy in the context of their internal and external environments - including their workers and environment. </p>
<p>The initiative has high-profile backers, including regulators, the accounting profession, investors, standard-setters and non-government organisations concerned with social and environmental stakeholders.</p>
<p>However, the consultation draft of the international Integrated Reporting framework released in April is already causing concern among directors, with the <a href="http://www.afr.com/f/free/markets/capital/cfo/regulators_stay_away_from_integrated_fIsbX7cXqeid6vR89TVEKN">Australian Financial Review</a> quoting directors worried about the prospect of being sued if disclosures on future strategies and business models don’t come true. </p>
<p>Anticipating resistance, the consultation draft states: “…the banner of commercial sensitivity is not to be used inappropriately to avoid disclosure”.
In fact, Integrated Reporting can help directors in their governance of risk-management processes and their decisions about strategy. It requires the development of processes to identify issues that materially affect strategy, the business model or the ability to create value. Such processes will improve risk management – thereby reducing director risk. It makes good business sense.</p>
<h2>Corporate changes</h2>
<p>The key issues on which Integrated Reporting is set to change corporate thinking are:</p>
<ol>
<li>Longer-term strategic planning</li>
</ol>
<p>Integrated Reporting stands out from other reporting frameworks with its emphasis on long-term thinking. The requirement to provide information on an organisation’s strategy will encourage senior executives and boards to think long term.</p>
<p>This is a win-win for the environment, society and business. Short-term thinking has contributed to significant negative environmental impacts that have damaged business reputations. There are ample examples of companies plundering the environment and abusing human rights to make a quick buck.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Focus on the ‘six capitals’</p>
<p>The ‘six capitals’ concept is a key innovation. These are: financial capital, manufactured capital, intellectual capital, human capital, social and relationship capital, and natural capital. In preparing an Integrated Report, a business recognises that they are all play a role in creating value. </p>
<p>Natural capital includes water, land, minerals, forests, biodiversity and ecosystem health. The maintenance of natural capital is seen as fundamental to long-term business success and organisations would be required to report its importance to the business, how the company affects it, and steps taken to maintain it.</p>
<p>Integrated reporting promotes an understanding of the trade-offs that are made across the six capitals in the process of creating value for providers of finance. This will improve decision-making. Boards will need to be ‘six-capital literate’ in order to assess performance, identify risks and develop strategy.</p></li>
<li><p>Creating value</p>
<p>The concept of creating value by working with a broad range of stakeholders such as workers, customers, local communities and regulators encourages senior executives and boards to think about performance more broadly than the financial bottom line so that value creation is long term and considers the effect on the other capitals. </p></li>
</ol>
<p>The process of developing an Integrated Report has many benefits:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>‘integrated thinking’, which involves collaboration across functions to consider the business model and identify trade-offs in the development of strategy</p></li>
<li><p>a future focus on strategy</p></li>
<li><p>identification of risks to the continued availability, quality and affordability of all six capitals, which are required to fulfil the strategy</p></li>
<li><p>development of systems and processes that will capture a broader set of information needed to make sound decisions.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Issues are defined as material if they could “change the assessments of providers of financial capital with regard to the organisation’s ability to create value”. This style of reporting relies on providers of capital having an understanding of what creates value, being concerned about the long term and communicating this to business. Reporting on social, environmental and economic sustainability performance will remain important for informing investors and others where value is depleted as well as enhanced.</p>
<p>The Integrated Reporting Consultation Draft mentions stakeholders in terms of their potential to affect the ability to create value – but not their concerns about organisations depleting value. </p>
<p>However, organisations ignore stakeholders at their peril. Stakeholder engagement is critical to challenging organisational thinking and making this change.</p>
<p>According to Mr Druckman, such engagement will be an ongoing process. </p>
<p>“The more that mature organisations are doing integrated reporting, the more they understand that they’re on a journey,” he told <a href="http://www.thesustainabilityreport.com.au/iirc-ceo-favours-market-led-adoption-of-integrated-reporting/3829/"><em>The Sustainability Report</em>. </a>“Integrated Reporting should be flexible enough that as societies’ objectives change, as investors’ objectives change, as the company changes its strategy and philosophy, that Integrated Reporting should change and mature at the same time. I don’t think there is a destination.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/13945/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Carol Adams receives funding from the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants. She was a member of the IIRC&#39;s Capitals Technical Collaboration Group. </span></em></p>Paul Druckman, the CEO of the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC), recently led the coalition’s global charge on corporate reporting changes to Australia, where he bolstered support and talked…Carol A Adams, Director, Integrated Horizons. Part-time Professor, Monash UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/134942013-04-15T19:57:53Z2013-04-15T19:57:53ZPaddy Manning got it right, Australian business media is failing its customers<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/22432/original/92t6j3g4-1365992711.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=496&amp;fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Big Business - like Big Government and Big Unions - should be held to account fearlessly by our media. But all too often the media pick sides.</span> </figcaption></figure><p>Last week business journalist Paddy Manning <a href="https://theconversation.com/paddy-manning-the-fairfax-watchdog-eats-one-of-its-own-13327">abruptly left Fairfax Media</a> after criticising his employer in public, and in a rival publication. His departure is not surprising – but there is much more to this story.</p>
<p>Manning had criticised the Australian Financial Review for publishing “creeping advertorial” content and more widely, the <a href="https://theconversation.com/fairfax-restructure-rearranges-the-deckchairs-13235">newly announced Fairfax operational strategy</a> that combines the business reporting of The Age and Sydney Morning Herald (known as BusinessDay) with the Australian Financial Review. </p>
<p>Initial reports said Manning had been sacked. Manning later <a href="https://twitter.com/gpaddymanning">tweeted</a> he had resigned; in an interview with the ABC, chief executive Greg Hywood said “we had to let Paddy go”. </p>
<p>Whatever the truth, the whole incident should be a warning sign to senior Fairfax management, investors, and subscribers.</p>
<p>What is particularly troubling is that Manning obviously felt that he couldn’t make those criticisms within the organisation. Conversely if he did make those criticisms he felt ignored.</p>
<p>But despite having been removed – Manning was quite right. People just don’t like reading advertorials – I know I don’t. Public relations is a very important business activity – but when business has to pay the media to run their PR then you’ve got to wonder if any real value is being generated.</p>
<p>We have just come through a massive public debate on free speech – there was an attempt to hobble the media’s ability to criticise government under the guise of privacy concerns and accountability provisions. But the role of media isn’t just to shine the spotlight on government – it should be shining the spotlight on everyone.</p>
<p>Big government, big business, big unions, in fact all centres of power should be held to account and subject to criticism. That is the role and function of the media in a liberal society. The media itself is held to account through competition amongst the media itself – articles such as this, for example. A media organisation that relies on advertorial revenue simply cannot perform that function.</p>
<p>The thing is that advertorials are not just another form of advertising. The message from advertising is clear. The advertiser is buying space in the media to sell its own message. The media does not (necessarily) endorse the message – it is a simple arms-length transaction.</p>
<p>Advertorials, however, are complex and messy. Here the media is being engaged to sell someone else’s message. The story ceases to be news, or opinion, and becomes public relations. But the value consumers place on news and opinion and public relations is very different. Here the media must endorse the message contained in the advertorial.</p>
<p>So maybe I’m over-reacting, seeing a potential problem that won’t actually manifest itself. Fairfax could argue that they are very well aware of the AFR’s excellent reputation, and would never squander that reputation by producing dodgy advertorials. Indeed that would be a good argument – their reputation is a very valuable asset and Fairfax is best placed to manage its own reputation. But that simply brings us back to Paddy Manning. He got sacked for saying, in public, that Fairfax was squandering its reputation. Why wasn’t his concern alleviated in private? Why couldn’t Fairfax management convince him that he had nothing to worry about?</p>
<p>When insiders go public in such a spectacular way, outsiders should take notice.</p>
<p>It worries me – as an avid consumer of news and opinion – that the media should see its role as selling PR to its readership as opposed to providing a platform for advertising while providing news content. Consumers should be as well-informed about business and economics as they are about politics.</p>
<p>It is here that I think the Australian business media doesn’t serve its customers as well as it could or as well as it should. One of the biggest economic stories right now is the forthcoming federal budget. Most of the media coverage of the budget will revolve around the political strategy of the budget. There will be little coverage of the economic strategy, and even less basic fact-checking.</p>
<p>Last week the AFR’s John Kehoe had <a href="http://www.afr.com/p/national/swan_spree_denudes_healthy_revenue_fNxIWfHivol7MapOMzMANM">this story</a> (paywalled) about budget revenue where he pointed out that Treasurer Wayne Swan had been misleading the public into believing tax revenue had been falling and not actually rising. But Wayne Swan has been doing that for years – and the media should have pulled him up on that years ago. </p>
<p>In fact the <a href="http://ipa.org.au/library/publication/1259709586_document_61-2_davidson-wayne_swan_vs_wsj.pdf">Wall Street Journal Asia criticised Wayne Swan</a> for this sort of thing in 2009. At the time I was struggling to interest the local media in Swan’s extensive abuse of language when talking about the budget. To be fair to the AFR there has been a massive improvement in that paper since a new editor was appointed and new management installed in 2011.</p>
<p>I worry there could be a perception that the AFR decided to confront Swan on this issue is because he is weakened. In fact his poor performance is now so obvious that the media cannot ignore it. However, the idea of “hyena journalism” (that is, going after the weak and wounded) undermines the good work that is done. Holding the government to account is just as important when the government is popular than when it is unpopular.</p>
<p>Kehoe has probably earned the Treasurer’s wrath and I imagine rude telephone calls would have been made – either to himself or the AFR editor. I hope the AFR publishes more of that sort of thing and not less.</p>
<p>The story would have been interpreted as the AFR choosing sides against the government. The Australian has long had a reputation as being anti-government. That is unfortunate – the media shouldn’t be seen as being pro-government or anti-government. Rather the media should be seen as holding the powerful to account for their actions.</p>
<p>I imagine much the same sort of thing goes on in corporate reporting too. If Paddy Manning is to be believed, it does. Now I don’t want to argue that the media should be pro-business or anti-business in the same way as the media shouldn’t be pro-government or anti-government. Rather the media should aim to the job of reporting well. Unfortunately all too often the Australian media don’t do that job well and does pick sides.</p>
<p>Consider, for example, the mining tax – this policy was predicated on the notion that minerals belong to all Australians, and miners didn’t pay enough tax. I found it astonishing that the media did not immediately challenge either of those two arguments – choosing in effect to back the government in what turned out to be a bitter fight with the mining industry. The Commonwealth of Australia is a federation and the minerals belong to the States. I cannot recall any journalist making this point or asking the federal government about the federal consequences of the mining tax.</p>
<p>So Australians got to read a lot about the political strategy surrounding the mining tax but not nearly enough on the economics of the mining tax. For too long large sections of the media, with The Australian being an honourable exception, simply accepted the Treasury arguments that the mining tax was good for Australia and wouldn’t impact mining at all. It was only after a serious error was uncovered that the hyena principle kicked in and <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/business/mining-companies-lying-or-ignorant-swan-20100524-w819.html#">media sentiment changed</a>. </p>
<p>In a world where the media is a player and not just an observer, people will always imagine it is picking sides. This further undermines any argument that advertorials can be innocuous.</p>
<p>I don’t think that the Australian media is captured by government or business, but I do think that it is too subservient to authority and power. This is a mistake – there have been some great outcomes when the media sticks to its guns. The Australian fearlessly exposed the waste associated with the 2009 stimulus spending and the Sydney Morning Herald exposed Craig Thomson.</p>
<p>There is a fine Latin expression, “Merda taurorum animas conturbit” and in a world of spin and PR it is the media’s role to highlight and showcase the bullshit. That means less hyena journalism. It also means that the media must be less credulous and more cynical.</p>
<p>A fearless media, however, requires financial stability and deep pockets. Therein is a serious challenge. The long-standing media business model revolving around selling advertising is in trouble. Firms struggling to maintain their own market position are not able to challenge the great and powerful in our society. In fact the recent assault on free speech was the hyena principle working in reverse. The government opportunistically tried to muzzle a weakened media industry.</p>
<p>So where does this leave us? Paddy Manning lost his job for speaking truth to power. That is what good journalism is all about. On the other hand I don’t blame his employer for sacking him. The Australian media generally would be greatly improved if more journalists would emulate Manning’s example – not criticising their employers in public, but rather telling the bitter truth about what is going on in the world around us. It is only through fearless reporting that a media firm could earn enough of a reputation to run advertorials. Of course, no media organisation with a reputation for fearless reporting would ever see the need to accept advertorials.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/13494/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sinclair Davidson has received funding from the Australian Research Council. He is a senior fellow with the Institute of Public Affairs. He has published opinion pieces in The Age, The Australian, the Australian Financial Review and the Sydney Morning Herald. He is a subscriber to The Australian and The Australian Financial Review.</span></em></p>Last week business journalist Paddy Manning abruptly left Fairfax Media after criticising his employer in public, and in a rival publication. His departure is not surprising – but there is much more to…Sinclair Davidson, Professor of Institutional Economics, RMIT UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.